Scapuch?

We are scientists, authors, reviewers and teachers and we engage in every part of the academic scientist’s journey from conducting the research to being the corresponding author on a publication. We are not putting up our middle finger to the publishers because we are dependent on them for getting grants, promotion and tenure. We are just trying to imagine a future where we could disseminate our research rapidly and have it stand on its own merits. Basically, we want all of the benefits of publishing (peer review, editing, formatting, posting the paper online, getting an impact factor, etc) but not have to pay the high costs to get our research out to everyone immediately.

We are so imbedded in the journal publication process for tenure, promotion and funding, that it seems impossible to see a future that does not involve a journal or its associated impact factor. So, that is why we started this site, a scientific authors public clearing house, to begin to look at all of the elements that would be involved in becoming journal-independent. What would peer review look like? Where would the paper live? Who would have access? How would it be referenced?

To start this project, we first looked at the state of the publishing industry. This was eye opening. The movie PAYWALL The Business of Scholarship, is telling. We never realized how massive these publishers are. To think they will go away quietly while the preprint servers and community reviewers take over is ludicrous.

So instead of replacing publishers there has been a strong movement to make what they publish open access. There has been significant movement in this area and many of the funding agencies now have policies dictating that their funded research be open access. Mandating and enforcing this is another issue, most likely because of the high cost of Gold open access (see here for definitions of the different types of access). Both the costs of publishing and cost of access to the published material brings up issues with equity, diversity and inclusivity. We need to do more work here.

The issue of peer review is also part of this equation, and there seems to be significant movement in this arena, both in offering peer review as well as getting credit for being a peer reviewer. All of this is a good thing.

Without a journal impact factor, how will we be able to assess a researchers impact? There is a strong movement, especially in the UK, to evaluate researchers independent of the journal impact factor. Altmetrics in addition to bibliometrics are being utilized to assess the researcher. Again, more work needs to be done here.

Finally, the increased uptake of preprint servers is a positive move to more open and rapid dissemination of research output. This has been transformative. We hope you find the resources on these pages helpful. We would love to hear what you have to say.